Friday, April 4, 2008

INFOGRAPHIC IDEAS

For my first info graphic I did a good job of making mistakes fast by figuring out that a lot of the highest paying and highest concentration of jobs are located in very small states but also received feed back on how to show this in a more detailed way. some ideas were to do a zoom in on that location using scale and proportion. others were to use bullets and employ type to explain the states each occupation was located in.

In my second info graphic I tried to keep it simply. maybe it was too simple base on the information I could find on the occupations I made a basic bar graph and tried to show the comparison of 6 occupations to the 132 million in the united states. Where i think this one is on and very understandable level its not interesting to me and possibly others. So I'm going to try and take my first direction and use some repetition to communicate more.

1 comment:

Looks like direction one has the possibility to evolve from here - but also consider my comments about direction two when you move forward on one.

Bring in more text, more labeling. What else can be said beyond "accountant" "Broadcaster". This isn't new research, but comes from your existing finds.

What is the width of the bars revealing? I see the vertical axis is quantitative, but can't read the horizontal differentiator. What is the color revealing (light yellow to red must mean some type of scale - define it).

The rendering of the map/letters has a visceral quality that is an interesting contrast to your icons. Maybe something worth evolving in the project - since you are tackling social content with these mechanical objects.

It is difficult comparing scale, shape and color at once. Can be more effective if you simplify to all circles so scale and color become the striking contrast.

As you encountered - state borders are arbitrary and often become a restraint when we are visualizing date that is not geographic-based. Check out these maps. http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/election/ They morph and warp the map to reveal true political breakdown in red/blue states in the last election.